Kiva is looking for developers

Kiva has lent out $58 million so far in microloans to the world’s poor, but it’s not growing as fast as it would like, said Skylar Woodward, the new director of Kiva’s developer program.

Sometimes lenders forget to re-lend their money when it’s paid back, he said. Kiva also has a hard time reaching people in the field who have slow Internet connections.

To help fix these problems, the non-profit today launched an Application Programming Interface — a gateway into Kiva’s software that will let developers write applications to run on iPhones or Blackberries, send alerts or integrate into social networks like Facebook where lenders could keep track of each other’s loans and maybe compete to make them.

“Someone who’s 18 years old and in college wants to interact differently with Kiva than someone who was given a gift certificate by the grandchildren and has not been exposed to technology,” Woodward said.

Kiva gets plenty of requests from people wanting to pitch in and help, he said, and this is one way for them to do it.

Woodward’s first job was non-profit — he supervised the development of whitehouse.gov for the Clinton administration while he was in college — and he believes Kiva is the first company of its type to try building a developer community. It’s been common at open source companies like Mozilla and at larger for-profit software companies like Microsoft and Oracle.

Kiva’s target for 2009 is to lend $60 million, as much as it’s lent in its first four years of existence.